Skip to content

Category: E-books

Published February 27, 2009

Something for the Weekend, Feb 27th, 2009

The 5 Rules of Book Cover Design Book — John Gall, VP and art Director at Vintage, talks about designing books at Barnes & Noble (video). There is also a nice print interview with John Gall from 2007 at STEP Inside Design magazine and another interview with the designer from the same year  at fwis Covers website (which is worth it just for the immortal line: “I want a telepathic dog.”) (John Gall at the Book Cover Archive— Pragmatism: A Reader designed by John Gall,  pictured above)

Fear, panic, and a little bit of hope — Sarah Weinman discusses the perilous state of  the publishing industry on NHPR’s Word of Mouth.

Chapters-Indigo‘s move into e-books, Shortcovers, goes live to much curiousity and twittering. The Globe and Mail has the basics, The National Post’s The Ampersand rounds up some of the reactions, but O’Reilly’s TOC seems to sum up the general mood: “A Good Start, But Room for Reader Improvement”. Michael Serbinis, the executive VP, writes about the first day on the Shortcovers blog.

(NB – I’ve sort of been ignoring the Kindle2 stuff as it’s not available in Canada, but — just to have some balance — E-Reads has a nice round up of the coverage).

Influence the future — Anthro Goggles lists the first 4 SF books you should read if you work in social media.

Jacket Copy — An interesting interview with David L. Ulin, book editor of the Los Angeles Times (who folded their standalone book section 6-months ago), in PW:

Ulin takes a realistic, broad-ranging view of how book coverage will be presented in the future. “I’m committed to both print and Web. There are two readerships, and I’m not sure they’re the same. My main interest is, how do we get the most book coverage to the most people?” Ideally, Ulin would welcome a return to the stand-alone book review. “But we don’t have one now, and we’re not going to have one,” he says.

modernism 101 : from aalto to zwart — “We specialize in rare and out-of-print design books and periodicals. Our carefully-selected online inventory spotlights both famous and forgotten modernist architects, photographers, typographers, and industrial designers in all their published glory.” How could I not link to this? Even if you can’t afford the books (which I can’t) you can at least look at the covers! (The Twentieth Century Book by John Lewis pictured above). (via ISO150)

And on a related bookporn note, Grain Edit has some rather nice pictures of Typographica, the design journal edited by Herman Spencer…

Comments closed
Published February 3, 2009

The e-book Revolution Favours the Agile (But Deep Pockets Help)

The publishing industry is finally turning toward “mass digitization”, Matthew Shaer reports in The Christian Science Monitor .

But “it’s not the bigger houses, such as Macmillan or HarperCollins, that are moving the fastest” he says. It is agile independent presses — who can make decisions quickly  and are “more open-minded when it comes to distribution and marketing” — that are “making the most extensive restructuring efforts” according to Schaer.

Independent presses are undoubtedly innovating — necessity is the mother of invention after all — and I would really love to believe that they can steal a march on the big publishers in the “e-book revolution”. Unfortunately I just don’t think it’s true. Or, at least, that simple.

Even if you ignore the Schaer’s assertion that the “typical” independent press can make quick decisions “without much internal friction” (in theory yes, in practice I’m not so sure), the ability to adapt is not just about a “fast and light ethos”, it is also about resources. It actually takes a great deal of time and expertise — often in short supply at small presses — to put a digital program in place. And although the cost of creating, marketing, and selling e-books may be low once the infrastructure is there, getting to that point requires a lot investment.

Soft Skull’s ambitious aim to have its entire list available digitally by the end of the year is a huge step for an independent publisher. But the two publishers Schaer specifically identifies as being behind the times are, in fact, already on this track. In November last year, Pan Macmillan made books available for the Stanza e-book reader for iPhones, and they currently offer a large, large number of downloads in different formats from their  web site, as do  HarperCollins .

In fact, ALL of the other major publishers — Random House, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster — offer e-books to download from their web sites in the US. Not that you would know from Schaer’s article.

And HarperCollins has been trailblazing with creative online initiatives in the past year. They set up Authonomy, a community site for writers, and are launching BookArmy, which Victoria Barnsley, chief executive of HarperCollins UK, describes as a “social networking site organised around books and authors.” . They’ve collaborated with if:book London and Apt to create an online, annotated version of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook , and in December they released a charming online video, This Is Where We Live, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their 4th Estate imprint, that quickly went viral.

In April 2008, HarperCollins also acquired The Friday Project — originally set up to find  web based material and turn it into books — as an “incubator for fostering new talent, and finding new markets.”

And let us not forget HarperStudio who may not be offering e-books yet, but have firmly established themselves on online.

Penguin have not been idle either. In December, Penguin US launched Penguin 2.0 to boost their web presence with an iPhone app and other downloads. Penguin in the UK — who sponsored in the recent BookCamp on technology and the future of the book — not only offer over 1,000 e-books on their website, they have an online dating service (no, really), and have created SpineBreakers, a web site with teenage contributors. And there is, of course, the ever-popular Penguin Blog.

The same day as Penguin 2.0 was announced, PW also reported that Random House would be partnering with Stanza and making select titles available for iPhones, and in January, Simon & Schuster relaunched their website with all the whistles-and-bells — such as blogs and author videos (outlined by PW here) — that one would expect from a publisher who knows their audience is online.

Of course none of  these strategies is perfect and the major publishers still have work to do on their e-books programs (there have been complaints about the  pricing in particular), but this is a period of experimentation and, with the best will in the world, it’s simply absurd to suggest, that the big publishers are “dinosaurs” who “think people are just sitting down in leather chairs and reading hardcopy books.”

Independent publishers may have “the most to gain from electronic publishing” as Richard Nash of Soft Skull says, and I genuinely hope that e-books usher in a renaissance of independent publishing. But the big publishers are not blind to the possibilities that technology is opening up and they have the resources to move quickly and boldly, and, in some cases at least, they are doing so. Let’s just give credit where it is due.

1 Comment
Published December 11, 2008

Midweek Miscellany, Dec. 10th, 2008

NPR’s Best Graphic Novels of 2008 include Josh Cotter’s Skyscrapers of the Midwest, Local by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly, Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Goodbye, and Alan’s War by Emmanuel Guibert (pictured). There’s an excerpt available of each book selected. Nice. (Thanks Ehren!)

A new way to express an old idea – An interesting interview with Canadian designer David Drummond at Books Covered (via Design Observer):

I tend to start with a list of words. For example I am working on a cover now that is about a dog but can’t show the dog on the cover. I like those kind of problems. How do you show this without showing it?

Amazon’s Jeff Bezo is PW‘s Person of the Year.

“Suburban surrender”: James Wood revisits Richard Yates’ blistering novel Revolutionary Road in the latest The New Yorker.

Little to do with books – The New York Times looks at the infighting and the politics of book groups:

Yes, it’s a nice, high-minded idea to join a book group, a way to make friends and read books that might otherwise sit untouched. But what happens when you wind up hating all the literary selections — or the other members? Breaking up isn’t so hard to do when it means freedom from inane critical commentary, political maneuvering, hurt feelings, bad chick lit and even worse chardonnay.

Russell Davies on “analogue natives”:

So much joyful digital stuff is only a pleasure because it’s hugely convenient; quick, free, indoors, no heavy lifting. That’s enabled lovely little thoughts to get out there. But as ‘digital natives’ get more interested in the real world; embedding in it, augmenting it, connecting it, weaponising it, arduinoing it, printing it out, then those thoughts/things need to get better. And we might all need to acquire some analogue native skills.

Comments closed
Published December 10, 2008

“A hint of optimism”

Publishers Weekly is reporting that following “one of publishing’s bleakest weeks” in living memory, there’s a reason for us to keep on living in the form of two recent digital announcements from Penguin and Random House.

Penguin have launched Penguin 2.0 which includes more online content, e-books and POD, as well as an app imaginatively called ‘Penguin Mobile’ which makes the features from Penguin’s website available on the iPhone.

In the meantime, Random House have announced a partnership with Stanza “the popular iPhone e-book reader from Lexcycle” that will make e-books by several RH authors available for free on the platform. According to the press release, the books available “will be drawn from each author’s backlist and will include excerpts for any new hardcovers coming in 2009.”

I have to say I was really surprised how much I like e-books on the iPhone. But what does this mean for single-purpose devices like Sony’s e-Reader and Amazon’s Kindle?

Comments closed
Published November 6, 2008

Media’s Last Die Hard?

The full transcript of Victoria Barnsley’s speech ‘Media’s Last Die Hard?’ (mentioned yesterday) is now available on The Bookseller website:

“the pivotal question for publishers, as we confront the opportunities and threats of digitisation, isn’t a reductive one – it isn’t about asking if the physical book is dead.  It’s about asking, what we’re going to be doing, in the next 10 years, to engage with an increasing number of digital natives – writers and readers alike, while at the same time, building rich temples of content, in all their printed or electronic glory.”

Essential reading.

Comments closed
Published September 30, 2008

Are E-Books Shovelware?

Introducing his five-part series BASIC Principles of Online Journalism (discussed last week), Paul Bradshaw notes:

It shouldn’t have to be said that the web is different, but I’ll say it anyway: the web is different. It is not print, it is not television, it is not radio.

So why write content for the web in the same way that you might write for a newspaper or a news broadcast?

Organisations used to do this, and some still do. It was called ‘shovelware’, a process by which content created for another medium (generally print) was ‘shovelled’ onto the web with nary a care for whether that was appropriate or not.

It was not.

With Peter Kent of DNAML recently suggesting  on the O’Reilly TOC blog that publishers treat e-books like software, and many e-books just digitalized versions of their print edition, are e-books falling into the category of  ‘shovelware’?

Certainly trade publishers have tended to think of the e-book as a ‘format’ — a cheaper, more convenient way to read text than an ordinary book that requires little amendment — rather than an entirely different ‘medium’ with new rules and possibilities.

Andrew Gallix, editor-in-chief of 3:AM Magazine mulled some of this over in The Guardian last week:

Bar a few notable exceptions (Penguin’s wiki-novel or We Tell Stories project), traditional publishers have used the internet as a glorified marketing tool providing them with new ways of flogging the same old same old: e-books, Sony Readers, digi-novels, slush-pile outsourcing… So far, the brave new world of digital literature has been largely anti-climatic…

I don’t think you  don’t need to embrace Gallix’s avant-garde e-lit leanings — or see e-books as completely detached from print — to appreciate that if they simply reproduce what’s already available, e-books are not really reaching their potential.

At the very least, authors and publishers should consider how the digital reading experience differs from that of print, whether this is producing new texts specifically intended to be published as e-books, or providing additional digital content for existing texts.

Thinking about Bradshaw’s  principles — brevity, adaptability, scannability, interactivity, community, and conversation — seem like a good place to start.

2 Comments